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First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States

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First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 From Rochel to Rose and Mendel to Max: First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States Jason H. Greenberg The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1820 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] FROM ROCHEL TO ROSE AND MENDEL TO MAX: FIRST NAME AMERICANIZATION PATTERNS AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY JEWISH IMMIGRANTS TO THE UNITED STATES by by Jason Greenberg A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 Jason Greenberg All Rights Reserved ii From Rochel to Rose and Mendel to Max: First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States: A Case Study by Jason Greenberg This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics. _____________________ ____________________________________ Date Cecelia Cutler Chair of Examining Committee _____________________ ____________________________________ Date Gita Martohardjono Executive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT From Rochel to Rose and Mendel to Max: First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States: A Case Study by Jason Greenberg Advisor: Cecelia Cutler There has been a dearth of investigation into the distribution of and the alterations among Jewish given names. Whereas Jewish surnames are a popular topic of study, first names receive far less analysis. Because Jewish immigrants to the United States frequently changed their names, this thesis can serve as a guide to genealogists and other scholars seeking to trace the paths of Jewish immigrants from Europe. Data was drawn from about 1500 naturalization records from Brooklyn in order to determine the correspondences between the given names featured on passenger lists and their Americanized counterparts. More than three-quarters of surveyed immigrants were revealed to have altered their names during the naturalization process, with English-language cognates and other phonetic and orthographic similarities ostensibly informing these changes. Keywords: assimilation, immigration, Jews, naturalization, onomastics iv PREFACE For better or for worse, I was born a Jew. My family was Ashkenazic, of various Eastern European origin, but because my parents and grandparents were born and raised in Brooklyn, New York always felt like my ancestral home. The shtetls of the former Austrian and Russian Empires were half a world away, and like many Jewish Americans I have met, I identified more with my anglophone, quasi-secular family in the United States than with my Hasidic forebears, all buried centuries ago in abandoned cemeteries in Europe, many of which have been converted into woodland or parking lots. It was a stroke of luck that my family happened to be obsessed with genealogy. I have fond memories of reunions during my childhood, when I was regularly thrust into rooms and expected to instantly bond with my second, third, and even eighth cousins. Awkwardness would inevitably ensue—my cousins and I may have been genetic relatives, but we were also social strangers—but even though I barely knew these people, the fact that we shared surnames and even some physical features would intrigue me. The older generations were even more enthusiastic; I can recall a second cousin of my father’s repeating ad nauseam the exact address of the home in Romania in which my great-great-grandparents lived, and my grandmother took pride in her stern, devout grandparents from Austria (actually Ukraine, as we later discovered). No family is perfect, and my own is especially guilty of intergenerational cycles of mistreatment and estrangement, but I would be remiss if I did not express gratitude to my relatives for allowing me to understand my roots. As a young adult, I began to take my family’s already sound and thorough genealogical records into my own hands, using the Internet to confirm or refute oral traditions and explore branches that had been neglected. Around the same time, inspired in part by my studies in Latin v and the Harry Potter series, I became obsessed with onomastics, and before long, I was regularly scanning The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language’s index of Indo-European roots and creating a database of the etymology of the name of every Hogwarts student. These two interests merged when I discovered passenger lists and naturalization records, as I was suddenly able to trace the exact steps my ancestors took as they immigrated, taking on several aliases as they did so. The more I untangled century-old cursive from Ellis Island and transcribed smudged, typewritten letters from rolls of microfilm, the more I realized that the names by which I knew as my forefathers were inconstant. One one branch, I learned that my great-grandfather Julius Cooper (for whom I am named) had previously been known as Juda Kuperschlag. On another branch, my great-grandfather Harry Morovitz (for whom I am also named) had been born Chaim Herszel Mrozowicz. My immediate family had been just religious enough to give me the Hebrew name of Yehudah Chaim purely for liturgical purposes, but it had never occurred to me that the foreign, overly velar moniker that I mostly ignored for years had in fact been two ancestors’ “real” names. I had never believed that there were Jewish men named Harry and Julius living in Poland and Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century, but I had never questioned how my great-grandparents self-identified before their arrival in New York Harbor. From there, I began to notice patterns. Two ancestors named Abram had chosen to be called “Abraham” in the United States, which was unsurprising. Three great-great-grandmothers were referred to as “Rose” on their children’s vital records in the New York Municipal Archives, and their original names of Roschke, Reise, and Rochel all started with the same letter. The names Velvel, Chaya, Nachman, and Taube, which appeared on multiple branches of my tree, were uniformly Americanized, respectively, as “William,” “Ida,” “Nathan,” and “Tillie.” With vi these trends emerging, I was able to make breakthroughs in my genealogical research based alone on what appeared to be the one-to-one correspondence between certain Hebrew and English names. The more that I collected data on my own family, however, the more I realized that name assimilation was not as simple as I had assumed. My aforementioned great-grandfather Harry Morovitz was born Chaim Herszel, but a great-great-grandfather named Harry Goldman had been born Aron Icek, cognate to “Aaron Isaac.” A great-granduncle named Harry Greenberg had been born Yudel, but had chosen “Harry” over the expected cognate “Judah” or the near- homophonous “Julius.” Another Chaim in my family, my great-great-grandfather Chaim Weiner, had chosen the English cognate Hyman, but a great-granduncle named Hyman Feldman was not originally Chaim, but Cheskel, or “Ezekiel.” More confusingly, my great-grandmother Gertrude Tobias did not have as her birth name the similar-sounding Gittel, but rather Dwosche, a diminutive of the Yiddish cognate of “Deborah.” Even more tantalizing, Gertrude’s sister-in-law, my great-grandaunt, had immigrated under the name Gitel Grimberg and lived for several years in New York as Gussie Greenberg, but after she married, she settled upon a given name that she invented herself: Luzela. A few of these alternative choices seemed perfectly reasonable, if unanticipated, but many sounded random. In July of 1998, a researcher named Warren Blatt hosted a lecture at the Eighteenth Seminar on Jewish Genealogy in Los Angeles, and during the latter third of which, he presented an original examination of onomastic data he had collected from upwards of six thousand Jewish graves from Boston and New York. Because it was customary during the early twentieth century, when these tombstones were erected, to include both the English and Hebrew names of the deceased, Blatt was able to perform a statistical analysis on the information he had gathered, vii determining the likelihood of correspondence among individual names. I was personally inspired by Blatt’s work, and from there, I developed the idea for this thesis. Unlike Blatt, however, I have not used Landsmannschaft graveyards as my source, but naturalization records. In addition to financial and transportation-related barriers, my reason for choosing to peruse naturalization records instead of sallying forth on cemetery safaris is to fill what I feel is a minor gap in Blatt’s research. Despite what the abugida on a gravestone would suggest, not all Jewish immigrants to the United States were known by their Hebrew names; on the certificates of arrival in the first microfilm roll that I analyzed, I saw the Italic names Clara and Max, the Germanic Herman and Ida, the Slavic Olga and Sonia, and even the English Davis and William interspersed with the more traditionally Hebraic Chana, Feiga, Moische, and Schloime. Clearly, naturalization records provide a significant, alternative perspective than that found on headstones. My wish is to supplement Blatt’s earlier, seminal work. By categorizing etymologically related names, converting all names into an adaptation of the Daitch-Mokotoff soundex, and examining common names of the early 1900s, I plan to pinpoint the flexible, unspoken rules that largely determined name assimilation practices.
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